Angry White People

Much of the political divide in this nation right now is focused between two distinct groups, angry white people, and everybody else. This subject has gotten a lot of attention lately after the recent departure of Tucker Carlson from FOX "News". In his role over there, Carlson as you probably know, cast himself in the role of chief defender, spokesperson and provocateur for tens of millions of angry white Americans.

On his show he typically addressed his devoted viewers as "YOU." That "you" was a means to distinguish his followers, or as Carlson put it, "Legacy Americans", from THEY, everyone who is not an angry white person.

Typical Tuckerisms include: 

• THEY'RE coming after YOU,
  
• THEY'RE taking your rights away from YOU, and most sinister of all: 
• THEY hate YOU.

Unfortunately Carlson is not alone in riling up white people,. The machines that drive both sides of the ideological divide in this country from politicians, members of the press, pundits and other public figures, to lowly bloggers such as myself, in our words and deeds, only exacerbate that anger, further dividing the country. 

So why are so many white people so angry? Google that question and you'll find all sorts of explanations, some logical, some let's just say, far reaching.

Here in Chicago and in several comparable American cities, there is a complicated historical force at work that contributes to white rage.

I've been thinking about it since I wrote this piece twelve years ago about a South Side Chicago Roman Catholic parish that closed its doors largely because of so called "white flight" from the neighborhood as black people moved in. That piece continues to be one of the most viewed posts on this blog. It struck a nerve as it has received by far the greatest number of negative comments of anything I have ever written.

I tried to be balanced in my assessment of why white people have historically moved out of neighborhoods in Chicago as soon as black people moved in. In the piece I cited institutional policies and greedy individuals who took advantage of people's fear, all of which contributed to white flight. Then I said: 

It would be easy to make a blanket condemnation of white people picking up stakes and leaving their neighborhood based on the threat of change...

Yet, next to our children, the biggest investment most of us have is our home. As much as we all would like to be community minded, the bottom line is that most of us need to look out for ourselves and our families first. "Get out before it's too late and you lose your investment..." may not be the most altruistic or public-spirited advice, but one certainly cannot say that it is not prudent.

I went into more detail in my recent post on West Garfield Park about housing covenants, redlining, contract selling, and other

...pernicious discriminatory practices that all but guaranteed segregation in the city and second-class status to people of color.

Despite taking the blame of white flight largely off the shoulders of most (but not all) average white homeowners, some folks reading the piece still took issue when I wrote that in addition to all those things I just mentioned, racism was also part of the mix.

I stand by that statement.

But here's the thing, there's racism, then there's racism. One type of racism leads people to dress up in white sheets, give Nazi salutes, and march with tiki torches while chanting "we will not be replaced." The other is nuanced and from my experience, to some extent lives in all of us. If someone tells you he "doesn't have a racist bone in his body", rest assured he either lacks the self-awareness to recognize it or is flat out lying to you.

For good reason, "Racist" in our society is one of the most devastating accusations that can be leveled against a person, as people by nature associate the word with the former, the unequivocal, un-nuanced, heil-Hitler form of racism.

But today, the word is thrown about with such reckless abandon, especially by the Left, that it has virtually lost its meaning, but not its offense. 

Another term that needs to be judiciously reconsidered is "white privilege."

There's privilege, then there's privilege. The former comes through access to money, higher education and personal connections, among other things.  The latter privilege is something that should be enjoyed by everyone who lives in a free society. Unfortunately, far too many of us, especially people of color, are often denied many of those privileges. Therefore, "white privilege" which for the record I believe is a real thing, is not something bestowed upon white people, but rather, something that is taken away from others.  

Yet like racism, the word privilege evokes a very specific image to most people.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, heir to the TV Dinner fortune, is undisputedly a man of great privilege in every sense of the word. The vast majority of his audience which is mostly white, does not enjoy the kind of privilege Carlson and the proverbial one percent of Americans have, and never will. 

Since Carlson is nothing if not two-faced, it's difficult to know exactly who he is or what he really believes. Judging from his public words, and now his publicly distributed private words, Carlson is likely also a racist in every sense of the word.  I'll go out on a limb here and state that the same is probably not true of much of his audience, although I haven't a clue how much. 

I read two books in preparation for my recent post about the Chicago neighborhood of West Garfield Park. The first was: Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago, by Linda Gartz. Gartz writes about growing up in the West Side neighborhood where both she and her father spent their formative years. Linda's formative years coincided with the drastic population shift of the community which went from virtually 100 percent white in 1950, to virtually 100 percent black in 1970.

In 1968, the neighborhood was hit particularly hard during the riots that took place after the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the subsequent decades, between 1970 and 2020, West Garfield Park lost nearly two thirds of its population. Unlike the vast majority of their fellow white West Garfield Parkers, Gartz's family remained, at least as landlords, (they moved out in 1965). As the buildings around theirs crumbled due to vandalism and neglect, Gartz's parents dedicated themselves to the upkeep of their three properties and faithful service to their tenants for the rest of their lives. (They died in the nineties).

Linda Gartz pulls no punches when describing some of the shortcomings of her family, including her mother's initial response to a black family moving to her block. But she also describes her mom's change of heart as she got to know some of her new neighbors.

Simply put, the message of the book is that both black and white families in West Garfield Park and other similar communities around the city, were the victims of bad actors, both government and businesses who profited off anger and fear of the white people, and the limited options for black people. The other message is that if we only could get to know one another on a personal basis, maybe we could begin to learn to live together.

That last point is also one of the messages of Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City. The book was written by Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage, two professors of sociology at Roosevelt University. The book is based upon Dalmage and Maly's interviews of white folks whose families moved away from the neighborhoods in which they grew up when they began to change racially, and the two sociologists' take on them.

In all the interviews, the subjects spoke with reverence for the neighborhoods their parents felt compelled to leave. These places are described, as the book's title implies, as virtual paradises, places where everyone knew, cared for and looked out for one another, where the only limitation placed upon kids was to be home as soon as the streetlights came on. 

This all hit home for me as I have similar idyllic memories of my life growing up in Humboldt Park, a couple miles from West Garfield Park. We left the community in 1968 when I was nine, not long after the West Side riots, for the suburb of Oak Park. 

Many of the negative comments to the post mentioned above, implied that as an outsider, I had no idea what I was talking about and had no right to criticize others who experienced something I had not. I pointed out that I did indeed have "skin in the game", bringing up my Humboldt Park experience. 

At one point in reading Vanishing Eden however, it dawned on me that I was being disingenuous. In describing the factors leading people to change neighborhoods, the authors distinguished between being pulled away or pushed away.  

A few weeks ago, I asked my mother what was the factor that made her and my father decide to leave the neighborhood in which she had lived for nearly thirty years. She told me about an incident that took place while she was walking to the corner store, (a classic example of the bygone days). On her way, someone spit on her from a second-floor window. "That was it.." she said, "we were out of there." OK my mother doesn't talk like that, but you get the picture. 

Thinking about it however, that incident, unpleasant as it was, was not the reason we left Humboldt Park. We left because we were living in a small rental apartment in a residential hotel building in which my grandmother was the manager. Both my parents had good jobs, both had cars, and money to afford to buy a house in the suburbs. In other words, they were acting out the "American Dream" just like the vast majority of their peers at the time. Long story short, we would have moved regardless, the spitting incident only hastened the act. 

In contrast, the families of the people interviewed in Vanishing Eden for the most part had already realized the "American Dream" of owning a home. Many were working class folks who had to save and sacrifice for years to achieve that goal and once there, had no intention of giving it up. Had external forces not intervened pushing them out of their beloved homes, they or their descendants might still be there.

Naturally there was great bitterness once their neighborhood changed. As I pointed out in the West Garfield Park piece, most of these folks knew nothing about the bad actors Linda Gartz speaks of in her book. What they knew was what they saw with their own eyes: time and again, once a neighborhood in Chicago went from white to black, it deteriorated rapidly. Given that, it's not too hard to figure who they came to blame.

In her book, Linda Gartz mentions that growing up, she and her family knew no black people personally. While I didn't have a great deal of close contact with black people as a small child either, one of the most memorable persons from my life in Humboldt Park was the contracted painter in our building, a black man by the name of Rogers. As my grandma ran the hotel, I got to know all the people who had a stake in the building from the owners to the janitor. Honestly I liked them all, but Rogers was especially kind to me, and I'd say he and I were as close to being genuine friends as a grown man of thirty-something and an eight-year-old child possibly could be.

Further background in my development, I have no childhood memory of my parents ever making a disparaging remark about black people. In fact, as I pointed out in this space at least a couple times, after I reported to them some nasty racial comments made by the parents of my best friend at the time, my parents told me in no uncertain terms that my friend's parents were wrong. As my father would always say: "people are people." I will forever be grateful for that.

It wasn't until we moved to Oak Park that I experienced virulent racism.  It was tough entering a new school in fifth grade where virtually all the kids had known each other since kindergarten. I met a kid in my class who seemed nice enough. He was smart and would actually talk to me without condescension. It turns out that he too was a new kid at the school, also having recently moved from the West Side. One day in the playground much to my surprise, he told me he and his family were moving again. When I asked why he said "because nig--rs moved onto our block and there's no way in hell we're going to live with them." Even at my young age I understood that while they came out of this ten year old boy's mouth, those weren't his words. 

Perhaps he was one of the people interviewed by Professors Maly and Dalmage for their book. Some of the interviewees while not being that candid about their feelings, were quite brazen by today's standards about expressing their bitterness and distrust of black people. One particularly disgusting excerpt is a couple recounting something that took place after moving to a new, all-white neighborhood. They were having a garage sale and a couple of black teenagers from another neighborhood bought a bicycle from them. As they walked through the alley with their new bike, a couple of neighbors who were cops chased after the kids and jumped them, assuming they had stolen the bike. The most disturbing part is that in recounting the story years later, the couple telling it were laughing, finding the whole incident amusing. 

Vanishing Eden is a revealing book, not only in the attitudes of its subjects, but also the attitudes of the authors, whose own bias comes through clearly.

The first clue comes from the book's cover illustration which features a faded photograph appearing to have been made in the fifties of a smiling white boy, three or four years old, sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon in the midst of what appears to be a tidy neighborhood of modest post-war homes. With the exception of the social class depicted, this picture evokes "Leave it to Beaver" and other period pieces that represent to many, a time of lost innocence in this country, all made possible in their minds by white hegemony.

The subtitle of the book: "White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Radically Changing City" drives home the point that the book's creators don't hold that opinion, and the photograph gracing the cover is there for irony.

In the book they make the point that their subjects view their old neighborhoods through rose colored glasses. To them, before the change everything was perfect and after, everything went to hell. 

Had they interviewed me about my own childhood experience of Humboldt Park, I would have told them pretty much the same thing, except the going to hell part.

The truth is I spent my formative years in Oak Park. I made some of my most cherished friendships there including my oldest and dearest friend, also an emigre from the West Side. I have no such connection to Humboldt Park. In Oak Park I had a back yard and a basement where I had nearly full reign, in addition to my bedroom. Three doors away there was a lovely park where I learned to play tennis. In the winter I went skating and sledding. For all intents and purposes, the "quality" of my life improved exponentially after we moved there. I am who I am today, for better or worse, by virtue of my life in Oak Park. 

Yet moving away from Humboldt Park was traumatic for me as things I dearly loved, my friends and the only home I knew, were taken away. Today I have no bad memories of my life in Humboldt Park, even though bad things certainly happened there. For years I mourned losing it and went back every chance I could. Despite there being no rational explanation for it, to this day I still feel in some ways more connected to Humboldt Park than Oak Park. 

Memory is a funny thing.

It's not surprising to me that folks who left their childhood homes around the same time I did, would have similar memories. It's even less surprising that they would express bitterness had they felt pushed out of their old neighborhood, especially if that idea was constantly enforced by the people closest to them.

Not many of the subjects in Vanishing Eden come off looking as horrible as the ones I mentioned above. Most of them, forty and more years after the fact (the book was published in 2016), understand the dynamics of race in this country and realize that black people themselves aren't to blame for what happened to their communities. But the authors in no way let these folks off the hook as they all in one way or other, express understanding for their fellow white folks, usually family members, who feel more bitter than they do, thereby "excusing their racism" as the authors put it.  

Thumbing through the book it's difficult to find a page where either the word racism or the term white privilege is not found. The authors are correct in pointing out that many white people who experienced white flight to this day have no intention of living on the same block as a black person Somehow, they weren't able to come up with any white flight veterans who had no problem living with black people. 

I wonder why.

They could have asked Linda Gartz. Perhaps the most revealing part of her book is where she mentions how during the civil rights movement of the sixties, her parents sympathized with the plight of black people in American South. That feeling didn't extend to the blacks who were moving into their neighborhood. This NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitude is not unusual, it's one of the less flattering parts of human nature.

On the same token, it's completely understandable why white people who experienced making the difficult decision of moving out of a changing neighborhood, would feel put off being judged by other white people who had no such experience. I imagine it would be doubly irritating for working class folks to have people with more money, education and influence, people who could afford to live anywhere they pleased, including affluent predominantly white suburbs, accuse them of racism and exercising their "white privilege", just for wanting their families to be able to live in peace and safety.

I don't know the personal backgrounds of Professors Dalmage and Maly. From their profile photographs, they appear to both be white. I can't say if either had the experience of living in a racially changing neighborhood. Dalmage was born in the mid-sixties and Maly in the eighties making them both too young, especially Maly, to have experienced the height of the era of white flight.  

It's clear they have an agenda, not a misguided one, reminding us that we'd all be better off if we learned how to get to know one another. Where they err in my opinion, is they make the same mistake they accuse their subjects of, they lack a sense of empathy. 

In my piece on the baseball player Ty Cobb, I embedded a powerful interview with the great Negro League ballplayer, coach, manager, and historian John "Buck" O'Neil. In that interview, O'Neil refuses to condemn people for being racists. Everybody has their own mountain to climb he suggests. "Babies aren't born prejudiced", O'Neil said, someone had to teach them to be that way.

Had Rogers and other good people like him not entered my life, had I spent my first years in West Garfield Park rather than Humboldt Park, had we not moved to Oak Park allowing me to meet the amazing people who would become my lifelong friends... 

Had a slew of other things that happened by chance in my life making me who I am today not happened, and most of all, had I not had parents who set me straight and taught me that the most important lesson in life is that "people are people", my outlook on the world may have been very different.

Had things been different, I too may have ended up being an angry white guy, falling prey to bad actors like the neighborhood busters, Tucker Carlson and the rest, teaching me to fear and distrust anyone who is different from me.

"There but by the grace of God go I" they say.

I think everyone of good will needs to keep that in mind.

IT'S JUST NOT FAIR

I've mentioned before in this space my favorite entertainment venue on the internet, the site Radio Garden. From RG, you can click any location on a Google Map of the world and will be presented with a list streaming radio stations from that location.

It does take a bit of work finding something worth listening to, because SO many stations around the world play the same stuff, that is to say contemporary pop music usually sung in English. 

But when you do find a gem, it's well worth marking it as a favorite and return to it again and again.  

One of my favorites actually does play music mostly in English; it's one of the best sources of classic American Country music I've ever come across. The station is called Rattlesnake Radio and it originates in Munich. Even better, RR mixes up country with blues, Creole/Cajun and other genres of what could be called American roots music, with a little R&B and Rock and Roll influenced by all those genres thrown in for good measure. A work colleague from Belgium particularly likes RR and on occasion when we're the only ones in the office, she requests I put it on. 

So yesterday while working at my desk and RR playing in the background, something strange caught my ear. No, it couldn't be I thought to myself, did the singer really say that? He sure 'nuff did. Then he said it again, and again. I wasn't really tuned in to the lyrics but what knocked me out of my senses was the "N" word repeated over and over again.

Still incredulous, I picked up my cellphone, held it up to the computer and asked Siri to name the song.

Even my Siri's sexy British accent could not lessen the foul stench of that word, which is right there in the title.

I'm not going to mention the title nor the guy who wrote and sang the song, as I don't want to publicize them, but I will say that after mentioning the title, Siri told me that the song was performed by Johnny Horton. That is wrong. Horton was a country star until his untimely death in 1960. The song in question was recorded nearly a decade later and the singer doesn't sound remotely like Horton.

What the hell is going on I thought, and why on earth would they play this song? My first thought was that it was a parody of country music and the culture of the place where much of it comes from. I immediately thought of a National Lampoon send up of Joan Baez where in the refrain, the singer with her spot-on imitation of the activist folk singer warbles: "Pull the triggers N___s, we're with you all the way, across the bay."

John Lennon also got away with using the word, not without a kerfuffle, as the title to his 1972 feminist protest song, "Woman is the N___ of the World."

Obviously neither song would come close to being released today; times have changed. 

But the song I heard on RR was nothing like either of those songs. No irony there, it was a bona fide no-holds-barred white supremacist, racist song. 

One might say, how about giving the song a little benefit of the doubt? After all, it came out over fifty years ago in a much different time. Shouldn't we judge works from the past in the context of their time and not ours?

Since I already mentioned him, I'll use Johnny Horton as an example. Many of his songs are ballads about historic events. I'm sure they turn many people off today for their "political incorrectness." One of them is a song about the horse of the discredited Indian fighter, General George Armstrong Custer. Ironically, the horse's name was Comanche. In its time I'm sure the song, named after the horse, did not provoke much controversy if any. Today as most of us don't have much compassion for Custer, his fate, nor his cause, the song sounds at best, dated, and at worst, a paean to imperialism and the genocide of Native American people. 

Yet Comanche is a song that might be given a pass (if you wish) for reflecting the values of a different time.

But not the song in question. Having lived through the time it was recorded, I can assure you it was as vile then as it is now. Since I refuse to print any of the lyrics, you'll just have to take my word. Or you could go by the fact that the song was so offensive it never received airtime on a radio station in the States, not even in the Deep South. 

I know nothing about how the Rattlesnake playlist is generated in Munich. Perhaps the program director is a computer. My Belgian friend (without hearing it) speculated that whoever chose to play the song, assuming it wasn't a computer, probably didn't understand the nuances of American culture enough to realize how truly offensive it is. I assured her that there is absolutely nothing nuanced about the song. You would have to be completely ignorant of American culture, the English language, or both to let this one slide. I seriously doubt that anyone running a radio station devoted to American roots music, one that's heard around the world via the internet, could be that ignorant.

Maybe I'm wrong. Or perhaps it was a mean-spirited intern on his way out the door. One can only hope.

Anyway, it got me thinking this morning that when you take away all the things that got the song banned from the radio in the U.S., the racial invectives, the threats of brutal violence and the humiliating degradation of human beings, the theme of the song is no different from much of the rants we hear today from members of the far right.

That theme is this: white folks in America got it bad, and that ain't good. My apologies to Paul Francis Webster and Duke Ellington.

That theme is propagated throughout right wing media, most notably by the chief spokesman and poster child for white victimhood, Tucker "Putin Didn't Call Me a Racist" Carlson. Unlike the author of the racist song who grew up dirt poor in Louisiana, if you were writing a dictionary, you'd have to put Carlson, heir to the Swanson TV Dinner fortune, at the top of the list of candidates for the illustration accompanying the entry on white privilege.

"What's that guy got to complain about you might ask? You got me, but as the most watched talking head on Fox News, his message that white people are the real victims of racism in this country, is music to the ears of many white folks all over this land of ours who feel that life just hasn't been fair to them.

Playing the victim is never a good look, especially when you're the farthest thing from one AND you're living in a time where there is true suffering in the world, which is all the time.

Multiply that exponentially when you're living in a time of war, which we are now, and the lives of people as we speak, are being turned upside down by a megalomaniacal dictator without the slightest hint of a moral compass, bent on murder and mayhem.

Listening to the radio the other morning, a report on Chicago's Ukrainian community coming together to deal with and assist in the plight of their loved ones back home was followed by the story of an Illinois state legislator complaining that he still had to wear a mask inside the state capitol house chamber, despite mask mandates being lifted statewide. Life sure is unfair, isn't it? 

Well in my book, children getting cancer is unfair. People in the richest country in the world having to choose between buying food and medicine is unfair. Unarmed people getting shot and killed by the police is unfair. Ukrainian people going about their daily lives just a week ago having to dodge Putin's missiles aimed at their homes today, is unfair.

Having to wear a mask is a minuscule inconvenience when you consider that it helps protect the health and wellbeing of other people. We should willingly and gladly participate in this effort, not whine incessantly about it like two year olds.

Have we really become a nation of spoiled little children?

Serious discourse on how unfair life is for white people in this country is not just found on right wing media outlets like FOX.

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds delivered the Republican rebuttal to President Biden's State of the Union Address the other night. Sprinkled in between rants blaming the current administration for all our nation's problems from the current inflation rate to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, normal stuff in hyper-partisan speeches like this one, Reynolds threw in some nuggets that with the exception of the abusive language, reflect the overall theme of white victimhood heard in the racist song:

Talk to Americans about what's on their mind. Ask them: What are your concerns? What keeps you up at night?
They'll tell you, and I can tell you what's not on that list.

They won't tell you that we should be paying people not to work.

A dog whistle as old as the hills, "paying people not to work" to the ultra-right, evokes images of black welfare queens and drug dealers getting rich by doing nothing, off the backs of hard working white people. But honestly, I've never met anyone of any color who balked at getting a free handout from the government, whether it was the monthly $250 COVID relief check from the IRS, (damn I miss that extra cash in the bank, thank you Joe Manchin), farmers getting paid NOT to grow crops, or rich people not having to pay their fair share of taxes. 

Americans are tired of a political class trying to remake this country into a place where an elite few tell everyone else what they can and cannot say. What they can and cannot believe. 

I for one believe there is no right in a democracy more sacred than the right to freedom of speech. The lack of tolerance for other people's opinions is not the exclusive domain of the left or the right, it exists on both sides of the political divide. But like all freedoms, freedom of speech is not absolute. What is often missed on both sides are a few things. First, freedom does not mean we have the freedom to say or do whatever we please, we cannot cause serious harm to others for example in the name of exercising our rights. Second, rights go hand in hand with responsibility which ties directly into number three: while freedom of speech means that the government cannot imprison you for what you say, it does not mean that you can say whatever you feel like with the expectation that there will be no consequences such as public derision, termination of a social media account, or even losing your job.

I'm not exactly sure who Governor Reynolds is referring to as the political elite class, I can only guess it is the party to which she does not belong, the Democratic Party. What is elite about the Democrats I don't know, perhaps it's simply because they are currently in power, and her party is not. The extreme right in this country does not hide its disdain for what they call the "mainstream media" which they claim is biased against them. While that may be true, there is certainly no lack of media outlets that are more than willing to espouse their ideology, FOX being a prime example. So I seriously question her assertion that anyone in this country is stifling her words or her beliefs. 

Save perhaps for one exception.

Consider the "N word". I often come across commentaries from the extreme right that claim how unfair it is that it's acceptable for black people to use the degrading word, but not for whites. 

You can't see it but I'm currently making that stupid, quizzical look on my face that Tucker Carlson is famous for. You know the look, the one someone once described as the look on the face of an eight year old who's just learned about sex.

In case you don't get it. let me explain in the simplest of terms. I have a family whom I love dearly. But like everyone else, once in a while, when someone in my family gets on my nerves. I reserve the right to use choice language to express my feelings of frustration. But don't think for a minute that you can talk the same way about my family unless you want a punch in the nose.

Is that unfair? If you think it is, then deal with it.

In other words, if you're white, you're perfectly free to use the "N" word, but understand that there can and will be consequences. That's not unfair, it's just the way it is, sorry.

They're tired of people pretending the way to end racism is by categorizing everybody by their race.

This is a new dog-whistle for the ultra-right, their claim to desire a "color blind" society. 

I find that particularly ironic since on the one hand, Republicans preach that we should not take into account a person's race, while on the other hand they are gerrymandering congressional districts to gain political advantage based upon race and creating voting restrictions that pointedly target and disenfranchise people of color.

I guess they figure if we don't take race into account, no one will notice what they're doing.

Now for the piece de resistance, a doozy that combines dog whistles both old and new, with a healthy dose of bullshit thrown in for good measure:

The Department of Justice treats parents like domestic terrorists but looters and shoplifters roam free. 

The first part is referring to the Justice Department investigating in the words of Attorney General Merrick Garland, a "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators" on the part of parents. The AG adds that: "While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views."

The parents in question are protesting issues near and dear to the hearts of the ultra-right, mask mandates and the supposed teaching of "Critical Race Theory." The latter is one of the latest contributors to the idea of white victimhood and another dog whistle to the white-right, because teaching the truth about American history in regard to race, might make their children upset. And according to them, parents obviously should have the final say on what they want and don't want their children to be upset about. 

Then comes one of the oldest racist dog whistles in the book. If you can't explicitly mention the "N" word, "looters and shoplifters roaming free" conveys the idea just fine to a particular audience.

Look, I don't believe that most Republicans are virulent racists. Many of their concerns such as the rapid increase of violent crime are legitimate concerns to all Americans, especially nonwhite Americans who are disproportionately the victims of it. 

But it's obvious that the M.O. of the Republican Party for a good number of years has been to react to the very real fact that at some point in the near future, the majority of Americans will no longer be white. Lots of white folks are scared shitless of that. So rather than trying to make their base more inclusive, a good number of Republicans, the ones currently in control of the party, have chosen the other route and have all but declared themselves to be the party of white people, then promote fear among their base that if something is not done immediately, democracy be damned if it has to be, the other folks will take over.

If you don't believe me, just ask our friend Tucker Carlson. 

Carlson may be the single most powerful voice today in the MAGA world. He is not an idiot; he just plays one on TV. I have serious doubts that he believes much of the stuff he puts out there, but he knows his audience and exactly what to say that will get them to coming back day after day. That's good for FOX's bottom line and for his own pocketbook which is already stuffed to the gills. 

Publicly anyway, Carlson is a staunch supporter of "White Replacement Theory", the idea that Democrats are actively importing immigrants from south of the border and other predominantly nonwhite countries in order to offset or in his words, "replace" white voters in this country, If you recall: "we will not be replaced" was the chant of the tiki torch carrying white supremacist mob in Chorlottesville in 2017. One of Carlson's most idiotic comments is this:

Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.

What could possibly be more unfair than that? Poor undeserving Tucks.

Beyond the utter nonsense of the idea of Democrats importing voters, the premise of that statement outlines the belief of the MAGA crowd that white people have a completely different agenda than nonwhite people, and that there is essentially nothing in common between us. How will we ever unite as a country with that attitude?

---

Sadly, there is still a big audience for the racist song mentioned above. I just googled it and the site listed over one hundred thousand results pointing to pages that feature the song and others like it. Reading the comments on those pages is really taking a dive into the darkest recesses of the American psyche. 

As we've seen, Carlson and Governor Reynolds to name just two, may not be card carrying white supremacists themselves, but they speak their language, and see no problem garnering their support.

These two and many others like them only worse, are the face of today's Republican Party.

If you are a Republican AND reject racism, this should deeply trouble you. There may come a time, and that time may be now, when you have to chose one or the other.